The KINKY secret life of the man behind Wonder Woman becomes a film

EVER wondered why it was that Wonder Woman, the most iconic female superhero of all time, was a dab hand with a lasso and was forever finding herself tied to railway lines, as well as chained, bound, gagged or locked in bank vaults?

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As he once put it: “The secret allure of women is that they enjoy submission and being bound.”

At home Marston was a polyamorist who lived in a ménage à trois with his wife Elizabeth, his mistress Olive Byrne and their four children.

This week a film about his unconventional life, Professor Marston And The Wonder Women, goes on general release but how much does anyone really know about Wonder Woman’s eccentric creator?

Marston was born in Massachusetts in May 1893 where he was brought up by his heiress mother Annie and several spinster aunts.

This matriarchal influence rubbed off and he became an early supporter of feminism and women’s rights.

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The love life of Wonder Woman's creator, Professor Marston, became a film

Highly intelligent he studied law and then psychology at Harvard where he wrote a thesis in which he described women as being mentally stronger than men but argued that they are also happiest being submissive.

In 1915 he married his sweetheart Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, whom he renamed Betty.

A qualified lawyer and psychologist herself she had observed that her blood pressure rose whenever she was angry or excited and carried out ground breaking research, which she then allowed Marston to pass off as his own.

It was this that led to him developing the prototype of the polygraph, or lie detector.

Ever obsessed with sex he had noticed that the gadget could also be used to measure women’s erotic arousal when they were watching raunchy films and concluded that brunettes were friskier than blondes.

Small wonder that he created Wonder Woman with luscious, long brunette hair.

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William Marston, Elizabeth Marston, Olive Byrne and various of the trio’s offspring

In 1919 it became clear that his marriage was not going to be conventional.

Betty was pregnant but that didn’t stop Marston bringing home young colleague Marjorie Huntley, a divorced librarian and women’s rights campaigner who believed in “love binding” – or bondage – and the psychic power of orgasm.

Marjorie, he informed Betty, would be living with them as a lover, an on-off arrangement that then went on for years.

In 1926 Marston became infatuated with 22-year-old Olive Byrne, his research assistant at Tufts University in Massachusetts where he was teaching.

His feelings were cemented when she invited him to a kinky fetish party where girls dressed as babies, were tied up and blindfolded.

Marston insisted Olive move permanently into the couple’s home, not as a lodger but as a lover.

The three of them became the basis of a free love cult – Marjorie dipped in and out – where they took on the titles Love Leader, Mistress and Love Girl and where “nudity, dominance and submission” were demanded of them by Marston in a typed memo of sexual instruction.

This arrangement led to him fathering four children: two with Olive and two with Betty.

He described his wife and mistress as “the feminists of our time” when Betty insisted Olive should be the one to stay at home and raise the children so that she could pursue her career as an academic.

When they all moved to a farmhouse near New York in the 1930s Olive boosted their income by writing occasional articles for the popular supermarket magazine Family Circle, ironically offering tips to housewives on how to build a wholesome home.

Her readers would have been morally outraged had they had any inkling of her own far less than wholesome family life.

In fact Marston would have been caught out by his own lie detector when he told people that Olive was his sister-in-law, while she claimed that she was a widow, working as the family’s housekeeper.

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She regularly quoted him in her articles as an expert on child psychology, including a piece in which he praised the effect of comics on American children.

It led to him being recruited as a consultant by All-American Publications (later part of superhero publisher DC Comics) and he pitched Wonder Woman to them as an antidote to what he called the “bloodcurdling” masculinity of Superman, Batman and other male superheroes.

He described her as being “psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world”.

Wonder Woman was a sensation from the minute she first appeared in All Star Comics in 1941.

Within a year she’d got her own comic selling more than half a million copies.

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Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman’s editor Sheldon Mayer once observed the glaring contradiction in Marston’s interpretation of feminism: “His idea of feminine supremacy was the ability to submit to male domination.

"William domination.

"He had a rather strange appreciation of women.

"One was never enough.”

Marston died of cancer in May 1947 aged 53 but Elizabeth and Olive continued to live together for the next 43 years until Olive’s death in 1990 aged 86.

PH/CLAIRE FOLGER

Luke Evans plays the role of Professor Marston in the film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Elizabeth died a month after her 100th birthday in 1993.

Whether they lived together as lovers or more like sisters, nobody seems to know.

Still, 70 years after Marston’s death and 40 years since Wonder Woman became a TV hit, played by Lynda Carter, the most famous of all the women in his life lives on.